Creating content for social media has two main purposes. The first is to create content people will engage with to drive traffic to a website. The second purpose is to create content that grows your social media channels. No matter which goal you’re after, you’ll get the biggest impact for both just by making the content as sharable as possible.

When people like your content enough to share it, it basically creates a small army of people that are doing your marketing for you. These people aren’t shills though – they’re only going to share the content if there’s something in it for them. Usually this means high-quality and enjoyable.

Sharable content needs to be relevant to the user in some way. This can mean it’s funny or insightful, but it has to bring some type of value. Your content may be brilliant, but if it’s not digestible on social media, none of that matters.

So what kind of social media content are people sharing the most? Here are 10 types that succeed.

Pictures

Pictures are by far the most sharable content. They’re currently the king of the hill by a long shot. Pictures get an 87% interaction rate on Facebook. That’s no surprise since photos are really easy for people to digest and understand. After all, they won’t share it if they don’t understand it.

Even if you’re sharing an article or other type of content, adding a picture to it will increase the engagement rate. Make sure the picture you choose is relevant and interesting.

Videos

Most major social media platforms allow you to post video directly to the platform in some way. Users often don’t even need to leave the site to view it. Video can be a great way to say what you want in a really easy way to engage. There can be limitations though. For example, on Twitter the max length of a video is 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

Animated Gifs

These are just like pictures, but supercharged. Sharing animated gifs can be a really effective way to get interactive with your posts. Sometimes a picture isn’t enough and a video is too much. That’s where a gif is perfect.

People are using gifs more and more to share emotion and to illustrate what they’re thinking. Sometimes just saying you’re “shocked” can really be enhanced with the perfect animated gif. These should be used to make social media posts more powerful, which will make your opinions more sharable.

Lists

There’s a reason you see “20 Ways to Decorate Your Kids Bedroom” posts on social media – lists are beloved by all. The main reason for this is how digestible they are. People can easily skim lists and understand the point. The more relatable the list, the more sharable it becomes.

For example, if you were a teenager in the 90’s, a list called “10 Breakfast Cereals of the 90’s You Forgot About” is extremely relatable to that group. It’ll be highly shared just for the nostalgic factor alone.

All the Data

Any time you have your own research or data to share, this is excellent unique content that can be highly relevant to your audience – which makes it sharable. Whatever industry you’re in, there’s always something unique you can dig up about users, products or interactions that will be of interest.

If you run an online pet shop, there’s all kinds of data you can turn into social media posts. Like the top 10 treats, or whether there are more cat lovers or dog lovers on the site.

Infographics

Data isn’t always the easiest to digest on its own. A wall of numbers or a research paper isn’t that interesting. However, an infographic can turn that boring data into a fun and colorful post. On Curatti, you’ll notice infographics on all kinds of topics.

There’s no easy way to create infographics. You’ll need to find a designer who can handle creating one for you. There are some best practices when creating an infographic, but making sure it’s well designed is one of the most important things.

Pranks

For some reason, people love pranks. Prank channels are some of the most popular YouTube channels. Prank videos are constantly getting shared around. You’ve probably had one or two pop up in your timeline today. Movie studios even use pranks to promote movies, and it’s easy to see why. The Jason Bourne movie prank video, above, has over a million views already.

Prank videos are quick hits of humor that are easily sharable and are almost universally loved by everyone. Our love of watching others be fooled, or watching for the genuine reactions of what may happen, make these pieces of content social media darlings.

The Meme

The meme is very similar to the animated gif in that it really helps drive a point home by using the sentiment of a character that most people likely know. It’s just words on top of a picture, but that picture adds so much to the words, that it’s irresistible.

Memes are also insanely easy to make. You can use any number of meme generators to find and create the perfect meme for what you’re trying to accomplish. The time it takes to make one, the ease to share them, and the fact that they’re almost universally understood means that they make excellent sharable content.

Product Reviews

The internet was invented for sharing research. When looking for content marketing that increase traffic, product reviews are one way to make that happen. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, there’s always products to review.

You can combine this social media content with many of the other ideas from this article as well. You can make a video, build a list, or create an infographic for your product reviews.

DIY Guides

Lastly, DIY guides are excellent niche content. Showing people how to build a cool desk for their workspace, a step-by-step guide to building a WordPress site, DIY ways to decorating a living room – almost anything you can think of will be great sharable content. This also works really well with pictures and video.

Sharable content isn’t just about the content type, it’s about the content itself. Making sure you’re generating high-quality content is the number one priority. Once you have that, fitting it into one of the content types above will certainly help with your success!

Norman Arvidsson

writer, blogger at self employed

Norman Arvidsson is a passionate writer who was born in Sweden but then moved to the United States with his family. Now his goal is to share his experience with others through blogging. Familiar with such areas as web dev and design, marketing, freelancing, startups, small business, self-development, and eLearning. Considers personal growth as the main goal in his life.